Deep within the Abyss, where countless realms of chaos overlapped without limit, Clark’s body continued to descend into the heart of the darkness.
There was no longer anything that could be called a direction.
The sky, the ground, and the worlds themselves had become tangled together, as though the boundaries of reality had shattered, leaving nothing capable of retaining its form.
And suddenly…
Something strange happened.
Fragments of an unknown power began to emerge from within Clark’s body.
They resembled tiny, transparent crystals, radiating a light the world had never known before, curling around his body in overlapping layers, one upon another.
It was not the energy of Chaos.
Nor was it a part of any universe.
It was something else entirely, something that did not belong to this place in any way.
The power spread around his body, as though constructing a wall that separated him from Chaos itself.
Then…
His heart beat.
Once.
Then again.
New fibers began to form around his heart, thread by thread, as though an unseen force were rebuilding his body from within.
That power spread through his chest, then surged through his veins and organs, until his body was restored completely to its former state, even his torn clothes returning to the way they had been.
He slowly opened his eyes.
The first thing that greeted his sight was not darkness.
It was an uncountable number of worlds.
Worlds layered over one another, places without end, and different beings living through their first or final moments without ever realizing that other worlds existed beside them.
He saw a surreal world drowned in darkness.
A man was holding his wife tightly while she trembled in his arms.
She spoke in a trembling voice:
“I’m scared…”
The man tightened his arms around her, then said hesitantly:
“So am I.”
He continued looking at her for a few moments before adding:
“But being afraid doesn’t mean we have to stop.”
He lifted his eyes toward the darkness stretching around them.
“We’ll keep moving forward…
and search for a meaning in all of this.”
And suddenly, Clark realized what was happening around him.
The scene before his eyes changed.
The overlapping worlds vanished, replaced by a familiar sight.
The treehouse.
He saw all of his friends there, and then the image settled specifically on Nerv.
She was so close that it was terrifying, so close that he felt as though he could simply reach out and touch her.
Clark stretched out his hand toward her with all the strength he had and shouted:
“Nerv…
don’t leave me!”
But his voice never reached her.
His body began falling once more, deeper and deeper into the endless Abyss.
He tried to hold on to the image, clawing at the empty space around him, desperately trying to reach her.
“Nerv!”
…
At the treehouse, the night was drawing to an end.
The first threads of dawn had begun to appear along the horizon, while Nerv remained lost in sleep.
And suddenly…
Strange whispers slipped into her ears.
They were not words she could understand, but a distant sound, like a scream coming from a place that could never be reached.
Nerv’s eyes flew open, and she sat upright in bed.
She remained perfectly still for several moments.
There was something…
Something that made her feel as though someone was calling her.
But she could not remember what the words had been.
She looked around.
There was no one there.
She reached out and switched on the lamp.
It went dark.
Then it came back on.
It went dark again.
Then lit up once more.
It flickered on and off several times in succession, without any discernible pattern.
Nerv furrowed her brows and muttered sleepily:
“Hmm?
Is the lamp broken?”
She got up and switched it off completely, then returned to her bed.
A few moments later, a faint smile appeared on her face as she remembered her dream.
It had been a strange dream…
but a beautiful one.
It never occurred to her for even a moment that the screams she had heard had not been part of her dream.
…
“Nerv!”
Clark shouted again, desperately reaching toward the image as it began to fade before his eyes.
But his voice reached no one.
The crystalline energy surrounding his body began to convulse.
The luminous shards cracked one after another, then shattered into tiny particles that slowly vanished into the darkness.
The power disappeared.
The instant it was gone, Clark’s body returned to free fall.
He tried to open his eyes, but he could no longer see anything.
The sounds around him began to fade little by little, until the worlds and scenes surrounding him disappeared as well.
He felt his consciousness slowly slipping away.
He tried to resist, but his body no longer obeyed him.
Then his eyes closed.
The sounds faded away, and the overlapping worlds scattered around him, until the only thing left in his consciousness was the distant echo of his own voice:
“Nerv…”
The entanglement between the worlds collapsed, the universes separated from one another, and the Abyss returned to its eternal stillness.
Nothing remained except Clark and the book, continuing to fall through a place with absolutely no end.
The Abyss was not merely a place where Clark was falling.
The Abyss was the darkness itself…
and the darkness was part of the Abyss.
It had no bottom, no end that the mind could comprehend.
It stretched in every direction, without any measurable distance, without any clear concept of inside or outside.
And deep within it…
There were countless universes.
Entire mathematical universes, governed by systems, equations, and laws impossible for the human mind to conceive, overlapping one another before slowly coming apart.
The equations themselves were cracking, and the laws governing those universes were collapsing one after another, as though the mathematical structure upon which they had been built could no longer sustain their existence.
Some universes lost their dimensions, while in others, distance and time collapsed.
Still others were reduced to nothing more than fragments of scattered equations drifting through the darkness.
And the deeper Clark fell…
The stranger the universes became.
More unstable.
More surreal.
And closer to total collapse.
Somewhere within that infinity, in a place that could not be identified…
Clark continued to fall.
He did not know how long he had been falling.
He did not know whether a single second had passed…
or millions of years.
Then, in the midst of that endless darkness, something appeared.
It was not a universe.
Nor was it a world.
It was simply a small balcony overlooking the darkness itself.
A simple floor, a low railing, and a hanging lamp mounted on one side.
The lamp’s light was strange, blending yellow with red, casting a faint glow over the place without revealing anything of the Abyss stretching beyond it.
There was nothing else.
No doors.
No entities.
No sounds.
Only a quiet balcony…
Suspended in a place where it should never have existed in the first place.
The balcony looked like nothing more than a flaw left behind by that place after its equations had been annihilated and the laws that governed it had ceased to exist.
And yet, it was there.
Still.
And suddenly…
Something fell from the depths of the darkness.
It was Clark.
He continued plunging unconscious through the void until his body suddenly appeared directly above the balcony.
He slammed violently into the railing.
His head struck the edge, opening a deep wound across his forehead, and blood began spilling across the balcony floor.
His body crashed onto the ground with tremendous force, his leg bending at a painful angle while his shoulder took a brutal impact that left him unable to move.
He remained still.
He did not move.
He did not open his eyes.
Only the blood continued dripping slowly onto the floor beneath that strange yellow-red light.
It pooled beneath him.
And suddenly…
Something fell from above.
The book.
It struck Clark directly on the head, then landed beside him with a soft thud.
For a moment…
Nothing happened.
Then the crystalline energy appeared once again.
Its luminous shards began forming around Clark’s body, spreading over him like a strange web of transparent crystals.
The energy moved through his body.
The wound on his head gradually closed, and the bleeding stopped.
Then the energy spread to his leg and shoulder, the broken bones sliding back into place as though time itself were being reversed inside his body.
His fractured ribs fused back together, the internal injuries vanished, and everything returned to its natural state.
Even the blood that had spilled from his body slowly disappeared.
It was not healing in the conventional sense…
It was a complete restoration of his body to a healthy state.
After a few moments, the crystalline energy vanished again.
Clark remained lying there motionless.
The book beside him.
Clark slowly opened his eyes.
He remained still for several seconds, unable to understand what was happening.
His neck was tilted toward the right, as though his body had not yet realized that he had regained consciousness.
He tried to move it, then stopped for a moment when he realized he felt no pain.
He furrowed his brows.
“Where am I…?”
Beyond the balcony was a small, quiet room.
In one corner, a dim red lamp cast a weak glow over the place.
In front of him was a sofa that looked strangely as though it had been placed in reverse, with an old, silent television behind it.
Along one of the walls stood a large bookshelf, filled with things Clark could not make out from where he was standing.
At the end of the short hallway beside the sitting room…
There was a door.
Clark stared at it for several seconds.
He slowly stood.
He moved his head cautiously, then froze for a moment.
The pain that had haunted him since awakening…
had vanished completely.
All that remained was a strange sensation of heaviness deep within his body.
He bent down and picked up the book from the floor, then headed straight toward the door at the end of the hallway.
He grasped the handle and tried to open it.
It did not move.
He tried again, this time with greater force.
Nothing.
The door remained completely shut, as though the handle itself did not exist.
Clark sighed, then gave up and returned to the sitting room.
He sat on the sofa and placed the book beside him, then began trying to piece the events together in his mind.
The Abyss…
The entity with the black hand…
His heart…
The fall…
The crystalline energy…
Then the balcony.
And after that…
This place.
Clark raised his eyes toward the wall.
There was a clock hanging above it.
He stared at it for several seconds.
Its hands were not moving.
In fact, there were no hands at all.
There was only a single number on its face.
0
Clark continued staring at it in silence.
Then he whispered:
“Zero…?”
Clark could not think any further.
His mind was still struggling to comprehend the place when…
Knock…
knock…